Editorial: Understanding the surge

Friday

Jul 25, 2008 at 12:01 AMJul 25, 2008 at 9:34 AM

Eighteen months after the launch of the "surge," there has been some progress in Iraq. That progress is apparently good enough for Republican John McCain to hang a "mission accomplished" banner over his campaign bus. Thanks to the surge, he says, we are winning this war.

Eighteen months after the launch of the "surge," there has been some progress in Iraq. Casualties among U.S. troops are down. The insurgency led by foreign terrorists in Anbar Province has been controlled. The Iraqi army is taking over security in some provinces. The Iraqi government challenged the Shiite militias that controlled Basra and parts of Baghdad.

That progress is apparently good enough for Republican John McCain to hang a "mission accomplished" banner over his campaign bus. Thanks to the surge, he says, we are winning this war.

McCain has even coined a new slogan: "I would rather lose a campaign than lose a war," McCain said, while Democrat Barack Obama "would rather lose a war than lose a campaign."

Strong words - and unfair ones. Both Obama, in 2002, and McCain, in 2007, bucked the polls and the positions taken by others in their parties in taking their stands on Iraq. Obama opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2002, which most supported. McCain supported sending 30,000 more troops in 2007, which most people opposed.

McCain also overstates - or just confuses - the effectiveness of the surge he insists on claiming credit for.

The sacrifices and hard work of U.S. troops are justly praised by both campaigns. Gen. David Petraeus also deserves praise for his counter-insurgency tactics, which are far more suited to this theater than the conventional warfare waged by his predecessors.

But many forces have been at work in Iraq these last few years, and not all progress can be cleanly attributed to surge McCain is trying to claim as his own.

The tide was turned in Anbar Province when a group of tribal sheiks, some of whom had been fighting Americans for years, turned their guns on the foreign insurgents instead. Petraeus and his officers helped, mostly by funneling money to the sheiks. In an interview this week, McCain claimed that was part of the surge, but the "Sunni Awakening" began in mid-2006, months before Bush announced the surge, and most of the additional troops deployed in the surge were sent to Baghdad, not Anbar.

The troops sent to Baghdad helped bring stability, to be sure, but it also helped that radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr instructed his militia to stop fighting. Two years of civil war between Sunnis and Shiites wound down, in part because millions of Iraqis had been driven out of homes in previously mixed neighborhoods or out of the country altogether.

The Iraqi government reasserted authority in Basra without help from the surge - Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki didn't even tell Petraeus he was sending in the Iraqi Army. U.S. troops helped when the Iraqis got bogged down, but it was the Iranian government that negotiated a cease-fire between Maliki and the militias.

Obama wandered into this thicket of other factors on his Mideast tour, attempting to explain why he was reluctant to give Bush's surge all the credit for improved circumstances. His nuance is harder to fit on a bumper sticker, but his appreciation of the complexity of the situation on the ground beats McCain's back-patting triumphalism. While he claims to be the more experienced of the candidates, McCain's miscues - confusing Shiites and Sunnis, misrepresenting the surge timetable and, recently, talking about problems on the "Iraq-Pakistan border" (there is no such thing) leave informed observers wondering.

It would help the debate if both candidates acknowledged that fixing Iraq isn't as simple as winning or losing.

MetroWest Daily News

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